Alan Ramias is a Partner with the Performance Design Lab (PDL), a consulting, coaching and training company that specializes in organizational performance design and improvement. He brings 30 years of consulting experience in the analysis, design and implementation of performance systems. He has worked with organizations in Asia, Europe and North America. He is a co-author of the books White Space Revisited: Creating Value through Process and Rediscovering Value: Leading the 3-D Enterprise to Sustainable Success.
Before becoming a management consultant, Alan was an instructional designer, training manager and organizational development manager at Motorola, where he worked for ten years, including as a member of the team that founded Motorola University. Alan led some of the first groundbreaking projects in process improvement that were the genesis for Motorola’s Six Sigma program.
Alan joined The Rummler-Brache Group (RBG) in 1991, and led improvement projects in such companies as Shell, Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Citibank, DuPont, Steelcase, Citgo, Hermann Miller, Louisiana-Pacific, Bank One, Microsoft, Chinatrust, and Standard Chartered Bank . He became a Partner and Managing Director of Consulting Services at RBG and was responsible for selecting, training and overseeing RBG’s consultant teams. He also conducted RBG’s process improvement training for such companies as Hughes, DuPont, Shell, ABB, Ericsson, Citicorp, Sun Microsystems, Steelcase, Eli Lilly, Dow Chemical Europe, Dow Chemical South America, Square D, Pioneer Hi-Bred, UOP, 3M and Shell.
Alan has presented on a wide variety of topics at numerous conferences, including the following:
•“The Dangers of Prefab Models," BBC conference, November 2012
•“Repositioning BPM for Sustainable Success,” keynote presentation at Gartner BPM Conference in London, March 2011
•“Crossroads: How HPT and IT can Improve Organizational Performance,” International Society of Performance Improvement (ISPI) national conference, April 2009
•“How to Make BPM Work (Even in a Recession)”, International Quality & Productivity Conference (IQPC), April 2009
•“The Two Dimensions of an Organization: An Architecture for Achieving Business Results,” Fall ISPI Conference, September 2008.
•“Designing the Process-Centered Organization,” ISPI Annual Conference, April 2008.
•“BPM Methodologies: Turning the Land of Confusion into Solutions for Your BPM Initiatives”, Gartner BPM Conference, Las Vegas NV, January 2008
•“People, Processes, Technology: Why Can’t They All Get Along?” Shared Insights Conference, April 2007.
•“The Origins of Process Improvement and Six Sigma at Motorola,” ISPI Annual Conference, April 2005.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Ramias, A., "Integrating Process Management," BP Trends, October 2014
Ramias, A.and Wilkins, C., "Baby Steps: Making Process Management a Reality," BP Trends, June 2014
Ramias, A.and Wilkins, C., "Making Process Management a Reality," BP Trends, March 2014
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Remembering Geary Rummler,”BP Trends, November 2013
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Location, Location, Location: Does It Matter Where Your Performance Department Reports?,” BP Trends, June 2013
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Who Does What? Role/Responsibility Charting in Improvement Efforts,” BP Trends, December 2012
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Uses of the 3-Dimensional Enterprise Model,” BP Trends, September 2012
Ramias, A., “The Mists of Six Sigma’” Performance Xpress, April 2012 (reprinted from BP Trends)
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Reference Models: The Long, Long Shortcut,” BP Trends, March 2012
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “In From Left Field,” BP Trends, January 2012
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “The Process-Centered Organization: Oh, For a Crisis,” BP Trends, September 2011
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “The Process-Centered Organization: Do You Know Where You’re Going?” BP Trends, August 2011
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “The Process-Centered Organization: The Long Road,” BP Trends, May 2011
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Who is Responsible for Process Performance?,” BP Trends December 2010
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Building Metrics for Processes,” BP Trends September 2010
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Measuring Process Performance,” BP Trends), May 2010
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “The Role of the Performance Architect,” BP Trends January 2010
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “What Process Owners Do,” BP Trends, October 2009
Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Varieties of Process Ownership,” BP Trends, July 2009
Ramias, A.J. and Rummler, R., “The Evolution of the Effective Process Framework: A Model for Redesigning Business Processes,” Performance Improvement, November/December 2009
Rummler, G.A, Ramias A.J., and Rummler R.A., “Potential Pitfalls on the Road to a Process-Managed Organization,” Performance Improvement Journal (published as a two-part article in April and May/June 2009 issues).
Rummler, G., and Ramias, A., “A Framework for Defining and Designing the Structure of Work”, BP Trends, (published as a 3-part paper in April and September 2008 and January 2009).
Rummler, G. and Ramias, A., “The IT-Business Gap: Another Root Cause,” BP Trends, December 2007.
Ramias, A., “What is a Process?” BPM Institute.org October 2007.
Ramias, A., “When You Say ‘Process,’ You Mean…?” BPM Institute.org, August 2006.
Ramias, A., “The Mists of Six Sigma,” BP Trends, October 2005.
Ask process improvement experts (which I have done over the years in teaching and consulting with such people) what is the hardest part of doing a process improvement project and they tend to say analysis. And in fact, it’s not just among process practitioners that you will hear people say that analysis is their most challenging activity: training program developers, organizational effectiveness types, change management coaches, etc., also tend to cite analysis as the toughest aspect of their work.
A question that forever nags at thinkers and practitioners of BPM is its relationship to strategy. In a recent book entitled Questioning BPM?*, one of 15 questions explored in the book was “Is BPM a strategic tool?” Eleven authors agree there is, or should be, a strong relationship.
The most common viewpoint among them is that BPM is necessary to an organization’s ability to execute its strategies. No matter what the strategy is or how it came into being, it simply sits on a shelf gathering dust unless there are actions taken to carry it out. And as soon as you enter the realm of action, an organization’s business processes are essential in executing the strategic intent. To carry out a corporate-wide strategy necessitates doing so through a company’s large-scale end-to-end processes, and that in turn requires recognizing, designing and managing those processes, which is the essence of BPM.
In the late 1970’s, I was a training manager in charge of teller training at a bank in the Midwest. I read Geary Rummler’s article “You Need Performance, Not Just Training” and experienced a Eureka! moment because I had just witnessed the exact scenario described in the article: an inept attempt at engineering the desired performance of tellers. This is the story of what happened before and after I applied Rummler’s principles of systematic performance improvement.
The title of the book that made Geary Rummler and Alan Brache authorities in the emerging field of process improvement and management back in 1990 was Improving Performance, but it was the subtitle (How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart) that caught attention. Decades later, people still refer to it as the “white space” book; that was why Geary’s 2009 follow-up to Improving Performance was entitled White Space Revisited.
Today the term “white space” has entered common parlance. There are even a couple of consulting firms using the term in their names. It’s come to mean any general lack of connection between things that should be connected. But its original meaning still has value for BPM and Operational Excellence.
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